Tag Archives: The Creation of Anne Boleyn

Expecting to die on the 18th, Anne took the sacrament at 2 a.m. By now all who were in contact with her must have been convinced of her innocence. Even her old enemy Chapuys was impressed by the fact that Anne, before and after receiving the Sacrament, affirmed to those who had charge of her “on damnation of her soul, that she had never offended with her body against the King.” In the 16th century, to speak anything other than the truth at such a time would be to invite the utter condemnation of God. Anne had nothing to gain and her salvation to lose by lying.

As Anne prepared for her death, Henry was spending much of his time at Chelsea, visiting Jane Seymour and making plans for their wedding. Chapuys describes the king as showing “extravagant joy” at Anne’s arrest. Convinced (or making a great show for posterity) that Anne was an “accursed whore” who had slept with hundreds of men, he was “very impatient” and wishing to have the thing done with “already.”

Anne too wished to have the thing done. Yet, cruelly, the execution was delayed twice, once in order to clear the Tower of possible sympathetic observers, the second time because the executioner had been delayed. The first delay dismayed Anne, who thought that at the newly appointed hour she would already “be dead and past my pain.” Kingston, who seems to have been an absurdly literal man, took her to be referring to the physical pain of the execution itself, and reassured her that “there would be no pain, it was so subtle.” Anne replied with her most famous line: “I have heard say the executioner is very good, and I have a little neck.” And then, according to Kingston, “she put her hand around [her neck], laughing heartily.” Kingston flat-footedly interpreted this to mean that Anne had “much joy and pleasure in death.” He apparently did not “get” Anne’s irony. At the news of the second delay, she was distraught. But “It was not that she desired death,” as she told Kingston (or perhaps one of the ladies, who then told him) “but she had thought herself prepared to die, and feared that the delay would weaken her resolve. “ So much for Kingston’s theory that Anne felt “joy and pleasure” at the prospect of death.

What she may have felt was something closer to what James Hillman describes as the state of mind that often precedes an attempt at suicide: a desperate desire to shed an old self whose suffering had become unbearable, and thus be “reborn” in the act of dying. This imagined rebirth, for Hillman, has nothing to do with belief in reincarnation, or even in heaven, but the perception, ironically, that the soul cannot survive under existing conditions. What Anne had been through was certainly enough to shatter any hold her previous life may have exerted on her. She had been discarded by the man who had pursued her for six years, fathered her daughter, and seemingly adored her for much of their time together. The person she was closest to in the world—her brother George—had been executed on the most hideous and shameful of charges. The rest of her family, as far as we can tell, had either abandoned her or—as Anne believed of her mother–was awash with despair and grief over what was happening. Still recovering from a miscarriage, her body and mind undoubtedly assaulted by hormonal changes and unstable moods, she had been sent to prison on absurd, concocted charges, and “cared for” there by women who were hostile spies. She knew she would never see her daughter Elizabeth again, and—unlike the fictional Anne of Anne of the Thousand Days, who predicts that “Elizabeth will be queen!”—had no hope, after Cranmer’s visit, that her child would ever be anything more than she had seen Mary reduced to: a bastardized ex-princess forced to bow down to any children the new wife might produce for Henry. She had been given reason to hope that she would be allowed to live, only to have those hopes crushed at her sentencing. In a sense, she had already been through dozens of dyings. Nothing was left but the withered skin of her old life, which she was ready to shed.

As she mounted the scaffold, wearing a role of dark damask (black in some reports, grey in others) trimmed with white fur, with a red kirtle (petticoat) underneath—red being the liturgical color of Catholic martyrdom—political and national affiliations continued, as they had through her reign and would for centuries to come–to shape the descriptions of her appearance and behavior. To an author of the Spanish Chronicle, she exhibited “a devilish spirit.” A Portuguese witness who had snuck in despite the ban on “strangers”, wrote that “never had she looked so beautiful.” An imperialist observer described her as “feeble and stupefied” (which would be understandable, and not incompatible with her looking beautiful as well.) Wriothesley says she showed “a goodly smiling countenance.” French de Carles commented on the beauty of her complexion, pure and clear as though cleansed by all the suffering. For all, the spectacle of a queen, wearing the white ermine of her role, mounting the stairs to the scaffold, was unnerving.

Unlike her trial speech and her “last letter,” Anne’s remarks on the scaffold made the more conventional bows to the goodness and mercy of the King—in this highly public context, it was virtually required, if only to prevent any retribution against surviving relatives—and asked the people to pray for her. She did not admit to guilt for the offenses with which she was charged or accuse the judges of malice, but did make reference to the “cruel law of the land by which I die.” By now, the four young ladies who had accompanied her to the scaffold (clearly not the hostile spies that had lived with her in the Tower, but others, more intimate with her, who she had been allowed to have with her in these last moments) were weeping. Anne, having helped them take off her robe—an act that in itself must have demanded great composure and courage—“appeared dazed” as he kneeled down, modestly covering her feet with her dress, and asked the executioner to remove her coif, lest it interfere with his stroke. The executioner realized that she was afraid of the pain of an impeded blow; she kept looking around her, her hand on her coif, anticipating the moment. Clearly “distressed” at the task he was to perform, he told her that he would wait until she gave the signal. “With a fervent spirit” she began to pray, and the Portuguese contingent, unable to bear it, huddled together and knelt down against the scaffold, wailing loudly.

Anne gave the signal. But either the executioner or someone else in charge had devised a scheme to distract Anne at the last moment, so the fatal blow would come when she wasn’t expecting it; he turned toward the scaffold steps and called for the sword, and when Anne blindly turned her head in that direction, he brought the sword down from the other side and swiftly “divided her neck at a blow.” As these things went—others had died only after multiple clumsy hackings—it was an easy death: if the naturalist Lewis Thomas has it right, it was far easier than her weeks of suffering in the Tower: “Pain, “ he writes, is useful for avoidance, for getting away when there’s time to get away, but when it is end game, and no way back, pain is likely to be turned off, and the mechanisms for this are wonderfully precise and quick. If I had to design an ecosystem in which creatures had to live off each other and in which dying was an indispensable part of living, I could not think of a better way to manage.” He quotes Montaigne, who nearly died in a riding accident and later described the “letting go” that he experienced at what could have easily been the very end:

“It was an idea that was only floating on the surface of my soul, as delicate and feeble as all the rest, but in truth not only free from distress but mingled with that sweet feeling that people have who have let themselves slide into sleep. I believe this is the same state in which people find themselves whom we see fainting in the agony of death, and maintain that we pity them without cause…If you know not how to die, never trouble yourself; Nature will in a moment fully and sufficiently instruct you; she will exactly do that business for you; take you no care with it”

Anne’s preparations for dying, facing the inevitability of her execution, may have been filled with internal good-byes to those she loved, relief at the shedding of a suffering self, or imaginings of meeting her God. I like to think of her final hours as immensely rich, in a way that I cannot comprehend but that were sustaining to her, even beyond her more conventional—but extremely deep, for Anne—religious faith. And then, at the end, I hope that nature or God (it makes no difference), gave her no more to figure out, no more to regret, no more to say good-bye to, no more work to do, and took care of her dying.

One of the great features of WordPress is the the annual year in review function. What readers viewed this year will help to both determine the topics that Susan writes about on this blog and to ascertain what topics she presents in public. The Top 5 Posts for the blog this year were…

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 26,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 6 Film Festivals

We could also tell you the five most popular search terms, but it is pretty standard stuff (Anne Boleyn, The Creation of Anne Boleyn, etc.). By far, we most enjoyed reading the odd search terms that brought people to the blog. Take for instance…

1. did anne boleyn have a secret child with the jailor in the tower (there’s a new one)

2.don’t play bridge with your wife (or what? What will happen? This led to someone coming to the site 4 times!)

Another search term was “it’s ok, she’ll laugh now.” We’re not quite certain what the searcher was looking for with that one, but it is amusing to think about how Anne would have viewed the attention that surrounds her today. Would she have laughed? It is an unanswerable question, but just by the internet chatter it seems that the fascination with Anne will continue well into 2013!

A quick note: British History Online was used to access a number of primary sources, such as The Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII; The Calendar of State Papers, Spain; Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice; and etc.

Ellis, Henry. Original Letters, Illustrative of English History; Including Numerous Royal Letters: From Autographs in teh British Museum, and One or Two Other Collections. With Notes and Illustrations. Vol. II. London: Harding, Triphook, and Lepard, 1824.

—. “KING SIZE! As Jonathan Rhys Meyers Returns to Our Screens in the Tudors, Research Shows That the Real Henry VIII Had a 52in Waist and Paid a High Price for Being a Rotund Royal.” The Daily Mail. April 10, 2009, p. 13.

Highley, Christopher. “”A Pestilent and Seditious Book”: Nicholas Sander’s Schismatis Anglicani and Catholic Histories.” In The Uses of History in Early Modern England, edited by Paulina Kewes. San Marino: Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 2006.

Jones, Ann Rosalind. “Nets and bridles: early modern conduct books and sixteenth-century women’s lyrics.” In The Ideology of Conduct: Essays in literature and the history of sexuality, edited by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Phillips, Lynn M. Flirting with Danger: Young Women’s Reflections on Sexuality and Domination. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

Pitman, Joanna. On Blondes. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2003.

Pizan, Christine de. “From The Book of the City of Ladies.” In The Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan, by Christine de Pizan, edited by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, translated by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Kevin Brownlee, 116-155. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.

Plaidy, Jean. Murder Most Royal: The Story of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006.

—. The Lady in the Tower. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1986.

Plato. Plato’s Symposium: A Translation by Seth Bernardete with Commentaries by Allan Bloom and Seth Bernardete. Translated by Seth Bernardete. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Reinke, Rachel. “Catfight: A Feminist Analysis.” Chrestomathy: Annual Review of Undergraduate Research, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, School of Languages, Cultures, and World Affairs, College of Charleston (College of Charleston) 9 (2010): 162-185.

Solana, Valerie. SCUM Manifesto (1967). Vol. Volume III: 1960 to the Present, in Public Women, Public Words: A Documentary History of American Feminism, edited by Dawn Keetley and John Pettegrew. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005.

Wyatt, George. Extracts from the life of the Virtuous Christian and Renowned Queen Anne Boleigne. Isle of Thanet: Rev. John Lewis, 1817.

Wyatt, Thomas. “Of the Courtier’s Life.” In The Poetical Works of Sir Thomas Wyatt With Memoir and Critical Dissertation by the Rev. George Gilfillan, by Thomas Wyatt. Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1858.

Wyatt, Thomas. “The Love Describeth His Being Stricken With Sight of His Love.” In The Poetical Works of Sir Thomas Wyatt With Memori and Critical Dissertation by the Rev. George Gilfillan, by Thomas Wyatt. Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1858.

The X-Files. Directed by et al Kim Manners. Performed by Gillian Anderson, and Mitch Pileggi David Duchovny. 1993-2002.

I’ve never actually given birth (my daughter is adopted) but from what I’ve heard and read, there are some similarities to writing a book—which I have done. Of course, there are many huge differences. Discounting cramped hands and a neck and shoulders locked in “flight or fight” position despite ergonomic equipment and regular massages, giving birth to a book doesn’t usually bring much in the way of physical pain. And true, your book, once delivered, doesn’t require regular diaper changes, and won’t eventually cast withering glances at you when you do something uncool. But just like a child, your book only truly belongs to you so long as it is not yet in the world. Once it has left your body, after a long process of struggle and labor during which you have alternatively cursed and cried and, perhaps, required some numbing anesthesia (pimento cheese and “Dance Moms” worked best for me), your literary baby is no longer yours to dream about. What will she look like? What will her future be? Will others embrace her warmly or handle her roughly? Will others love her the way that I do? The time for fantasy is over. Like a real baby, your literary child has become a separate being and will have a life of its own—a life that you cannot bend to your will, no matter how hard you try.

Of course, the timetables for gestation and early infant development are hugely different. The Creation of Anne Boleyn took six years for the DNA to become fully formed flesh, and the birth itself is taking over a year. Of course, this is because I’m doing it the old-fashioned way—with a press rather than a home-birth and straight to an e-book—and like other methods of birthing, may eventually become obsolete. I hope not—for reasons that I’ll save for an editorial some day. But the old-fashioned way certainly requires patience!! You may be told, mid-way through the pregnancy, that you need more exercise (my original editor, an inspired midwife, packed me off to England to do interviews.) You may think you are about to give birth several times, only to be sent back home and told it was a false labor. During the last stages, you are cranky and temperamental, you eat too much, you cry easily, you get into fights with your loved ones. And finally, when the baby emerges—at first only seen by those close to you–she is still a mess, covered with your blood and requiring a good clean up before she can go out in public.

And then, even though she is all tidy, you have to wait a long time before you can present her to the world. And there’s still so much work to do!!! Permissions to obtain, author questionnaires to fill out, proposed outfits (covers) to decide among, and birth announcements (blurbs) to be arranged (a process during which you try not to think about how many such requests you have turned down yourself). And then there will be copy-editing (largely a matter of making sure the child learns to speak in grammatical sentences) which can be tedious and contentious if you are attached to your own odd ways of putting things. Page proofs!! Public Relations! What to do when the rights to the illustration you really, really want can’t be obtained! Decisions about this, decisions about that. And most difficult: continuing about your business while you wait…. and wait…. and wait.

It’s the waiting—where I am at now, with a March 2013 pub date–that’s the killer. As when you are expecting a baby (or awaiting an adoption, as I was when Cassie was born), it’s hard to think about anything else, or DO anything else. This stupendous event is on the horizon, and they expect you to continue to go to work? To have normal social interchange (i.e. not about your baby/book) with friends? To brush your teeth, take a shower, get dressed occasionally? And worst of all, to WRITE ANYTHING ELSE? I don’t wanna!!! I can’t!!!! I won’t!!! And so, the articles that I am committed to write stare at me accusingly, glowering in their pre-conception state: “So you think now that this baby is coming, we can just be ignored?”

My daughter, Cassie

I’m struggling to concentrate on anything except my two babies: the book one and the human one (now thirteen) to whom I remain faithful. She will always be more important. As for my husband, he’s fine with my state of distraction; the Tour de France is on the television.

And, as with many pregnancies, although just a few months ago I couldn’t imagine ever going through this again, the idea for my next book is already beginning to gestate. She’s just a little bubble of thought at this point, a “hmmmm…” more than a plan. Even so, it startles me to think that I actually am imagining bringing another book into being.

Socrates/Plato believed that some of us get pregnant in body, and others in mind. The ancient duality is false, of course, for pregnancy is not mindless and many women manage, quite successfully, to birth both kinds of babies. I once mourned the fact that I was not able to be one of them. Not anymore. I have my wonderful Cassie, and a new book baby soon to jump out of my arms and into the world. May the world treat both of them warmly!!

After his years with intelligent but conventional Katherine, Henry had found Anne, whose young womanhood had been shaped by confident women unafraid to speak their minds about virtually any subject to be an intellectually and erotically stimulating challenge. But the court was still very much a boy’s club, in which Henry had delighted in surprising Katherine by showing up in her bedroom, one morning, with 12 of his hyper-active companions, dressed like Robin Hood and his Merry Men. “The queen,” Hall reports, “the ladies and all other there were abashed, as well for the strange sight, as also for their sudden coming.”[1] Blushing bride, boisterous husband; it was just the way it was supposed to be. But Anne was not a blusher. Spontaneous and intense in an era when women were supposed to silently provide a pleasing backdrop for men’s adventures, Anne had never “stayed in her place”— which was exciting in a mistress, but a PR problem in a wife. Even if Henry’s own fascination with Anne had remained unwavering (which it probably did not; after such long, unrealized pursuit, even the most enchanting woman would have to seem a little too “real”) her involvement (read: interference) in the political and religious struggles of the day was a continual annoyance to her enemies, who saw her as the mastermind behind every evil that properly should have been laid at Henry’s feet, from the destruction of Wolsey and More to the harsh treatment of Katherine and Mary.

We know from her actions that Anne was not content to flirt with power through womanly wiles and pillow-talk. She was a player. Although a few historians are still insistent that Anne’s contribution to “The King’s Reformation” (as G.W. Bernard titles his book) was exaggerated by later Protestant “rehabilitators” of Anne’s image, by now most historians agree that Anne was not just the face that launched the reformation, but an active participant herself. She was an avid reader of the radical religious works of the day (many of them banned from England and smuggled in for her), both in French and in England. Her surviving library of books includes a large selection of early French evangelical works, including Margueritte de Navarre’s first published poem (Miroir de l’ame pechersse”, 1531), which was later to be translated into English (as “Mirror of the Soul”) in 1544 by Anne’s 11 year-old daughter, Elizabeth.[2] Anne’s library also included Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples’ French translation of the Bible, published by the same man (Martin Lempereur) responsible for publishing Tyndale’s New Testament, and numerous other French evangelical tracts. She had Tyndale English-language New Testament (which was to become the basis for the King James Bible) read to her ladies at court. She also introduced Henry both to Tyndale’s anti-papal “The Obedience of a Christian Man” and probably also Simon Fish’s “Supplication for the Beggars.” James Carley, the curator of the books of Henry and his wives, also sees it as highly significant that all the anti-papal literature that Henry collected supporting his break with Rome dates from after he began to pursue Anne.[3] Although she may not have supplied the actual readings herself, the couple was almost certainly discussing the issues and theological arguments involved, as both were avid readers of the Bible.

This was a time of religious anarchy, and although clear-cut divisions between various sects were not yet established—in fact, the Protestant/Catholic divide was just forming itself—Anne clearly stood on the “evangelical” side of issues. In those days, that chiefly meant a belief that the word of God was to be found in the Bible, unmediated by the interpretations of Popes and priests. But direct, “personal” access to the Bible required, for all but the classically trained elite, that it be available to them in their own language. This was a cause Anne passionately supported. She secured the appointment of several evangelical bishops and deans when Henry created the newly independent Church of England. She attempted to intervene on behalf of reformists imprisoned for their religious beliefs. Multiple corroborating sources from her own time remember her as “a patron of rising evangelicals, a protector of those who were harassed” both “a model and champion” of reformers, “in England and abroad.”[4]

The promotion and protection of the cause of reform was an especially dangerous business for Anne to engage in, because it was such a divisive issue (to put it mildly) and men’s careers (and sometimes heads) would hang or fall depending on which side was winning. Anne’s took a risk in showing Tyndale and Fish to Henry, but it was one that initially paid off, as he immediately saw that they were on the side of Kings rather than Rome when it came to earthly authority. (Henry’s reported reaction to discovering Tyndale—“This is a book for me and all kings to read”—is one of those quotes, enshrined even in The Tudors, that have become pop signatures of his recognition that he didn’t have to argue with the Pope, just ignore him. ) But even if Henry had no objection to Anne’s tutelage, others did, and their objections were a potent mix of misogyny and anti-Protestant fervor. Much of the gossip that circulated around court and through Europe came from the tongues (and pens) of those for whom to be anti-papal was to be pro-devil. “Lutheran” women (an incorrect appellation for Anne, who did not subscribe to Lutheran doctrine) enraged Catholic dogmatists, who were quick to accuse them of witchcraft—an old charge against “talkative,” impertinent women which was particularly handy when the women were “heretics.” From “heretic” to “witch” was a short step, and from “witch” to “insatiable carnal lust” and “consorting with the devil” took barely a breath.[5] The same year that Anne was executed, an effigy of evangelical Marguerite de Navarre, on a horse drawn by devils wearing placards bearing Luther’s name, appeared during a masquerade in Notre Dame.[6]

Protestants, of course, could be no less zealous than papists in their diatribes against women who presumed to interfere in men’s business—particularly when women who threatened to bring Catholicism back to the throne were on the horizon. Actually, the Protestants could be even more vehement, as they had a religious doctrine within which the Father, whether God, King, or husband, was the model of all authority. Depending on which side you stood—Catholic or Protestant—determined which presumptuous women were most offensive to you. When Mary Tudor became queen of England in 1553, her Catholicism added fuel to the fire that was already burning in Protestant reformer John Knox, who argued, in his famously titled The First Blast of Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, “that any woman who presumed ‘to sit in the seat of God, that is, to teach, to judge, or to reign above a man’” was “a monster in nature.”[7] And then the old familiar charges came pouring out again: “Nature…doth paint them forth to be weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish, and experience hath declared them to be unconstant, variable, cruel, and lacking the spirit of counsel and regiment.”[8] No wonder that Elizabeth felt it important that people see her as having “the heart and stomach of a King”![9]

Anne Boleyn’s problem, though, as far as public relations went, was the pro-Katherine, papist faction. It was they who called her a “whore”, a would-be poisoner, and a vicious corrupter of otherwise sweet-tempered King Hal. It was they who later spread rumors that she bore physical marks of the devil on her body. It was they who were most terrified of her insidious influence on the King’s politics. Her actual contribution to the scourge of Lutheranism, far from being minimized as it later was to be in the writings of early 20th century historians, was inflated to unbelievable proportions. In one letter to Charles, Chapuys went so far as to blame “the heretical doctrines and practices of the concubine” as “the principal cause of the spread of Lutheranism in this country.”[10]

It was preposterous, and Henry certainly didn’t believe it. But it created a political/religious “wing” of anti-Anne sentiment that could be exploited by Cromwell when he turned against Anne, and was a powerful obstacle in the way of Anne’s acceptance by the (still largely Catholic) English people. In gaining that acceptance—and with it some protection from the winds of shifting politics—Anne already had several strikes against her. She had supplanted a beloved queen. She was rumored to be “haughty” and suspiciously “French”–and even worse than that, a vocal, intellectual, “interfering” woman. Jane Seymour, when she entered the picture in 1536, was no less the “other woman” than Anne was (and probably more deserving of the charge of using her virginity as bait than Anne was), but her apparent docility miraculously spared her, when she became queen, from the antipathy that Anne inspired. True, Jane was a believer in the “old ways” and a supporter of Mary’s rights, which would have endeared her to Chapuys no matter what her personality. But although later historians would question just how docile Jane actually was, in her own time she was constantly commended for her gentleness, compassion, and submissiveness, which she advertised in her own motto: “Bound to obey and serve.” With few exceptions, the stereotype has not lost its grip on popular culture.

With Anne it was quite the opposite. Even those who shared her religious views, like Cromwell, had no scruples about spreading nasty rumors when it suited their purposes. For Anne’s reputation as a woman who simply would not behave as she should had created an atmosphere that did not incline men to be her protectors, but rather freed them to take the gloves off when fighting with her. And while her unwillingness to occupy her “proper place” was not in itself the cause of Cromwell’s turn against her, it certainly contributed to their stand-off, unleashed his ruthlessness, and insured his success in planning her downfall. “Had she been gracious and modest,” writes 19th century commentator James Froude, “she might have partially overcome the prejudice against her.”[11] “Gracious and modest” seem like laudable qualities. But what they meant in the context of the times and why Anne could never play the part is laid bare by David Loades: “Anne…could not pretend to be a fool or a nonentity, and the self-effacement customary in a royal consort did not suit her style at all…In many ways her sharpness of perception and readiness of wit made her more suitable for the council chamber than for the boudoir.”[12] But women did not belong in the council chamber.

Anne herself recognized that she had over-stepped the boundaries of appropriate wifely behavior. At her trial, insisting that she was “clear of all the offences which you have laid to my charge,” she went on to acknowledge, not only her “jealous fancies” but her failure to show the King “that humility which his goodness to me, and the honours to which he raised me, merited.”[13] Anne’s recognition that she had not shown the King enough humility, in this context, shows remarkable insight into the gender politics that undoubtedly played a role in her downfall. She stood accused of adultery and treason. Yet she did not simply refute those charges; she admitted to a different “crime”: not remaining in her proper “place.” In juxtaposing these two, Anne seems to be suggesting that not only did she recognize that she had transgressed against the norms of wifely behavior, but that this transgression was somehow related to the grim situation she now found herself in.

The idea that Anne was aware that she had fatally defied the rules governing wifely (and queenly) behavior may seem, at first, like the wishful, anachronistic thinking of a 21st century woman looking for would-be feminists in the shadows of every historical era. But actually, educated women of her time were very much aware of the various debates concerning the “querelles des femmes,” which is first introduced by Christine De Pizan in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, and which had a particular resonance in Britain, where the issue of whether or not women were suitable to rule became more than just theoretical under Henry VIII’s reign. Pizan is most famous for her Book of the City of Ladies (1404-5), which gathers heroines from history and Pizan’s own time to refute ancient views of female inferiority, and which was published in Britain in 1521, around the same time that Anne was about to return from France. Historians of women have made a strong argument that Pizan’s book became part of an ongoing debate about “the woman question” in England, beginning with Juan Luis Vives Instruction of a Christian Woman (1523), written expressly for Mary, and insisting, against Pizan’s arguments, on the necessarily subordinate role of women. The debate continues in 1540 and 1542 with Sir Thomas Elyot’s refutation of Vives, Defence of Good Women andAgrippa of Nettesheim’s Of the Nobilitie and Excellence of Womankynde, which historian Constance Jordan describes as “the most explicitly feminist text to be published in England in the first half of the century”.[14] In its original Latin form, published in 1509, it was dedicated to Margaret of Austria, who was to be Anne’s first model of Queenly behavior. Anticipating later enlightenment thinkers, Agripa argued that the differences between men and women were only bodily, and that “the woman hathe that some mynd that a man hath, the same reason and speche, she gothe to the same ende of blysfulnes (spirituality], where shall be no exception of kynde.” Why then are they everywhere subordinate to men? Because they are not permitted to make the laws or write history, and therefore “cannot contribute to or criticize the intellectual bases on which they are categorized as inferior.”[15]

To describe Anne Boleyn as a feminist would be an anachronism—and not nearly as appropriate an anachronism in her case as in that of Marguerite de Navarre and others who openly championed for female equality. Marguerite did not have the word, but she was conscious of a women’s “cause.” There’s no evidence that Anne felt similarly. But she had learned to value her body and her ideas, and ultimately recognized that there was something unsettling about this to Henry, understood that this played a role in her downfall. “I do not say I have always shown him that humility,” she said at her trial, insistent even then on speaking what she believed.[16] Anne wasn’t a feminist. But she did step over the ever-moving line that marked the boundary of the comfort zone for men of her era, and for all the unease and backlash she inspired, she may as well have been one.